AT THE GALLERIES

The work of LG WIlliams at Wirtz resembles painting, but it is mixed media collage on canvas.

We might never figure out by looking at them that Williams develops his pictures from computer-processed found images.  Being assemblages of small printed sheets of paper and transparent plastic, his pieces have a handmade look at odds with their graphic style.

The closest artistic cousins to Williams' art may be the image-clogged work of Sigmar Polke and the early black-and-white paintings of Roy Lichenstein.  Williams quotes Lichtenstein directly in his "Study for ( ( Sshh!!" (1999).

Comic-strip and advertising images, things scavenged from old textbooks and mail-order catalogs and some details of his own invention colide in Williams' pictures.  They exude an air of social critique, but it is hard to tell what Williams is against.

The format he uses makes it seem that Williams wants to hold open a space in which painting might resume in earnest once the trouble is over.  But his dreary implication is that the trouble is history itself.